The new SPI will be very different from the old.
It is not only being broken into two parts, but the marketing agency will have two types of shareholders and three types of directors.
On April 6, Saskatchewan’s hog marketing agency will lose its sales monopoly.
On that day SPI will break into two parts. One will administer and distribute the money from a checkoff levied on every market hog produced in Saskatchewan. The money will be used for research, promotion and issues of importance to all provincial producers. The checkoff is mandatory and can be enforced, said SPI chair John Germs.
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SPI’s marketing wing will become SPI 1998. It will sell member and non-member hogs.
SPI 1998 will inherit the present SPI’s assets, which include the agency’s collecting yards, its share of Intercontinental Packers in Saskatoon and TaiWan Packers in Moose Jaw, and its offices. These assets will be owned by SPI’s “A” class shareholders.
Anyone who has sold a hog through SPI in the past two years will have the right to buy an “A” share.
But “A” class shareholders will not receive dividends or profits from SPI or the two packing plants it partly owns.
That money will go to the “B” class shareholders, who receive their shares based on the number of hogs they market through SPI.
Higher prices for members
The new company is asking prairie pig farmers to contract all of their hogs. Those “B” shareholders will receive a pooled price for their hog sales. Other producers who are not SPI members can also sell through the company, if it has room for them, but they will receive lower prices than SPI members.
The board of directors for the research board is being elected now.
The board of directors for the marketing board will be established over the next two years. It will begin with a provisional board of appointees who will gradually be replaced through elections.
Directors will all be elected at large, with no delegate structure, but they will come from three categories. The four “A” class directors will be elected in autumn 1999 by all producer-members on a one-farmer-one-vote basis.
The three “B” class directors will be elected in late fall 1998 on a one-marketed-pig-one-vote basis. The final two will be elected by the Hutterite colonies, with one to represent the Darius sect and the one to represent the Leherleuts.
